Pro-gun crowd to Scott Brown: Stay away from New Hampshire

NASHUA, N.H. — Scott Brown attracted more than 125 pro-gun conservatives to a GOP holiday party here Thursday night — but they came to protest his appearance, not to hear him speak.

The spectacle — protesters outnumbered activists who coughed up $50 to see Brown — was a stark illustration of the treacherous political terrain facing the 54-year-old New Hampshire transplant if he launches a Senate bid that’s looking more likely by the day.

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Brown, who pulled up to the old Nashua Public Library in his iconic GMC truck, which still bears Massachusetts plates, is being courted by Washington Republicans as their best and probably only hope of swiping Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate seat next year. But Brown will have to square his left-leaning record on guns and abortion with a Granite State GOP electorate that’s well to the right of the one he’s been used to.

“His coming here is calculated disrespect, just as if he went to Saudi Arabia with pork chops in his suitcase,” said Jay Simkin, a 60-something economic consultant who lives in Nashua. “If he wants gun control, he should stay in Massachusetts.”

Simkin was among the people, most clad in orange hunting gear and a few carrying guns, who stood in a dark and snowy park to tell the ex-Massachusetts senator that they don’t want him to run for Senate. They singled out his support for a federal assault weapons ban, his opposition to a national conceal-and-carry law and the endorsement he received from gun-control proponent New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg last year.

Inside the building, Brown continued to stoke speculation about his intentions, which have morphed in a matter of weeks from being widely viewed as attention-grabbing antics to he’s-actually-likely-to-do-this serious. Brown made no news in the speech, which was closed to the press.

None of the state’s legion of self-identified strategists thinks Brown wouldn’t ultimately win the nomination and be formidable against Shaheen. No other GOP candidate would come close to matching his war chest or skill on the campaign trail that propelled him to an upset win four years ago.

But should the ex-senator pull the trigger on another run, he’d have to navigate the same dicey GOP divide that’s bedeviled other party moderates.

“He had a voting record that was between (Susan) Collins and (Olympia) Snowe,” said state Rep. J.R. Hoell. “That’s Maine, not New Hampshire!”

Brown also described himself as “pro-choice” in commercials last year, broke with his party to cast the deciding vote on the Dodd-Frank bank regulation bill and strongly supported then-Gov. Mitt Romney on Romneycare. Brown voted against Obamacare, however.